Zenkoji Temple Sutra Repository

A Library You Turn

The Zenkoji Temple Sutra Repository (善光寺経蔵, Zenkoji Kyozo, also written Zenkō-ji Kyōzō), the sutra repository of Zenkoji Temple in Nagano City, Nagano Prefecture, was completed in 1759 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 29 May 1965. It sits west of the main hall, a compact square building that most visitors walk past on their way to somewhere else.

They are missing the point of it. This is not a storehouse with shelves. The entire centre of the interior is occupied by a machine: an octagonal revolving bookcase, roughly six metres tall, four metres across and weighing about five tonnes, mounted on a central pivot. Inside it sit 6,771 volumes of the Tetsugen Ōbaku edition of the complete Buddhist canon. Push the case one full turn clockwise and, by long tradition, you have earned the merit of reading every volume in it.

Work started in 1754, four years after the great gate was dedicated, and the dedication ceremony for the repository was held in 1759. The head carpenter was Uemon, the same Zenkoji temple carpenter who had led the gate. Both roofs were changed to cypress bark in 1930.

Why It Was Designated

The Agency for Cultural Affairs values the building as part of a set. Its commentary treats the repository alongside the main hall and the great gate, arguing that the three together demonstrate the scale appropriate to a major temple compound of the early modern period. A rich temple in the Edo period was expected to build at this level, and few surviving examples show it as completely as Zenkoji does.

Taken alone, the repository earns its place on craftsmanship. The plan is five bays square, single storey, under a pyramidal hōgyō roof, raised on a stone platform. The columns are finished with tapered chimaki heads, and horizontal ties run at floor level, at lintel level and as a daiwa plate at the top. Bracketing is double-stepped, with frog-leg struts between, and the eaves are double-raftered.

Openings follow a strict rhythm. The centre three bays of the front are panelled doors and the end bays flame-shaped windows; each flank has a panelled door at the centre and a flame-shaped window beside it; the rear has a sliding entrance at the middle and boarded wall elsewhere. Nothing is arbitrary.

Inside, the floor is stone laid on the diagonal. The columns of the core rise past the ceiling line and are tied to the outer columns by curved kōryō beams, an ordinary enough arrangement, except along the front. There the builders removed two of the central columns outright and spanned the resulting gap with a single large beam carried on a bottle-shaped strut. Pulling structure out of the way to open the approach to the revolving case was a deliberate choice, and it is the sort of decision that separates a competent building from an interesting one.

The detailing leans heavily on zenshūyō, the Chinese-derived Zen style, particularly in the brackets. That is worth registering: Zenkoji has no Zen affiliation. It belongs to no single sect and is maintained jointly by a Tendai and a Jōdo institution. The style was chosen for what it looked like, not for doctrine.

Inside

The contrast hits as soon as your eyes adjust. The building itself is shirakigi, bare unpainted timber, deliberately plain. The revolving case at its heart is lacquered black, and the bracketing on it is painted in full polychrome. A railing runs round the case and a diamond-patterned transom fills the upper section.

By the entrance stands an image of Fu Daishi, the sixth-century Chinese layman credited with inventing the revolving sutra case. Images of the Tendai patriarchs Dengyō Daishi and Jikaku Daishi are also enshrined here.

Outside the door sits a stone wheel carved with the six characters of the invocation Namu Amida Butsu, called a rinnetō. Turning it is held to accumulate merit in the same way. Visitors reach for it almost without thinking, which is arguably the whole design intention of both objects: a form of practice that asks for a gesture rather than a lifetime of literacy.

Worth pausing on that. In 1759, almost nobody could read 6,771 volumes of classical Chinese scripture. The revolving case makes the canon available as an act instead of a text. The building is a piece of religious engineering aimed squarely at ordinary pilgrims, which is the same instinct that shaped the deep floor plan of the main hall next door.

Visiting the Zenkoji Temple Sutra Repository

Entry to the Zenkoji Temple Sutra Repository needs the sutra repository ticket, sold at the building. Prices and opening hours for the whole temple are on the Zenkoji Temple page. The repository stands west of the Main Hall, near the Nihon Churei-den that houses the Zenkoji History Museum.

Inside, you may push the revolving case clockwise yourself. Give the building more time than its size suggests: ten minutes is enough to turn the case and leave, but thirty lets you study how the great tie beam spans the front and the colour on the bracketing.

The stone prayer wheel in front of the building can be turned without a ticket. Zenkoji says that photography and the use of images within the precinct and its buildings require an application, so follow the notice at the entrance about photography inside and clear any pictures for news or publication with the temple office.